Although colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States, it is also often treatable. Early detection of colon polyps is a key to treatment. CT colonography (CTC), also known as virtual colonoscopy, is a promising new non-intrusive detection technique where polyps are identified from computed tomography (CT) scans, sometimes with the aid of a computer-aided detection (CAD) system.
While the inner boundary of the colon wall has often been the focus of previous colon segmentation work, detection of the colon wall outer boundary is often difficult due to the low contrast between CT attenuation values of the colon wall and the surrounding fat tissue.
Thus, more work is needed to better detect the colon wall outer boundary and otherwise improve virtual colonoscopy technologies.